I made JSX for Lua (because I hate static sites)
This website now runs on a custom language called LuaX.
It’s like JSX, but for Lua. You just write a Lua file that returns a chunk of HTML. You can compose more interesting pages by writing functions that return HTML.
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It feels like we’ve regressed. 15 years ago it was fine to run a script from scratch on every single request, but today we insist that we have to serve every personal website from a CDN. That means no fun allowed—if you so much as want the ©2023 in the footer to update, you’ll need to rebuild and redeploy the site.
I don’t want that. I want my ©2023 to update dynamically, dammit.
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I have tried so many template languages over the years. I’ve used mustache, Liquid, nunjucks, Blade, Django, and of course Go templates (commonly seen in systems like Hugo).
...Just like the C preprocessor, these template languages are not real languages. They are inflexible and inextensible. The few tools they provide for reuse and composition are incredibly weak. And just like C macros, these languages aren’t powerful enough to manipulate the data they’re given, only to blindly spit it back out.
...This is why JSX is so much better. Instead of JS-inside-HTML, it’s HTML-inside-JS. It flips the ownership around. When you need to do something interesting, you don’t need to learn some underpowered language, or contort your work to fit a broken system, or remember which escaping functions to use. You just write code and the rest sorts itself out.
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So he ported the lua parser to go, and modified it to include his own JSX-alike!
What I wanted was something I could embed easily in an existing app. Lua fit the bill nicely. But even more importantly, Lua is extremely easy to parse. The entire language grammar fits on one screen, and the official parser is less than 1500 lines of code. Furthermore, Lua didn’t use
<for anything except comparisons, so there was no ambiguity—HTML tags could be used wherever tables were used.
It was therefore very easy to create a custom recursive descent parser. I mostly just ported the official parser to Go, and modified
parseSimpleExpto parse tags as well as tables.
...The end result is less than 1000 lines of code. About 700 of them are just parsing Lua, with the remaining ~300 being used for my new features. And it took me only a couple days!
Lovely, lovely stuff. Clear thinking and bold action.